The Henry Louis Gates Jr. affair (“gatesgate”) seems to be some kind of national rorschach test. Gates has portrayed it “as a modern lesson in racism and the criminal justice system.” Or as put more eloquently by Stanley Fish: “The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?” (Fish also ties this question to the media frenzy over Obama’s birth certificate.) But others have seen it as a class issue: “He isn’t outraged because he feels he was the victim of racial profiling by the police… He’s outraged because he was the victim of class profiling.” Rush Limbaugh takes a similar approach, as does the National Review. Or even (albeit much less convincingly) gender: “would any of this have happened if the major players had been women?” (Um, don’t you watch COPS?)
But it doesn’t stop with class/race/gender. It is also an issue of civil liberties: “the thing about all of this that creeps me out the most is that so many people are willing to defend this officer who…arrested a guy because he didn’t like his attitude.” Or, “professionalism“: “By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53 [the statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct].”
As mentioned above, most mainstream right-wing pundits seem to be taking the “elitist” tact on this case, but some go even further, arguing that it is reverse-racism: “All he has is a collection of prejudices about the group to which the officer belonged: white police officers. And based on that collection of prejudices, Gates leapt to a conclusion — this police officer is a racist.” Others on the right seem eager to reduce the story to a personal narrative, emphasizing how the cop, “James Crowley has taught a class about racial profiling for five years…”
I don’t get the impression that it is a case which has attracted quite as much attention outside the United States, certainly not here in Taiwan, but I could be wrong. I’d be very curious to hear from our readers how this incident has been portrayed elsewhere.
(Thanks to Carole McGranahan for pointing out the “personal narrative” angle.)
UPDATE: Charles Blow has more on the different experiences of race in the United States and how they affect how one is likely to interpret this story:
Whether one thinks race was a factor in this arrest may depend largely on the prism through which the conflicting accounts are viewed. For many black men, it’s through a prism stained by the fact that a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.
UPDATE: Another “professional” frame, this one saying that shooting someone for asserting their constitutional rights (instead of obeying immediately) is, in fact, what one should expect from a well-trained police officer:
He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.
UPDATE: Over at anthropoliteia, a blog devoted to the anthropology of policing, Jeff Martin says this is a teachable moment:
To focus discussion of the event onto the cultural dynamics by which larger issues are made relevant to social action, we can usefully borrow Marshall Sahlins’ concept of the “symbolic relay,” i.e. symbols which are deployed to “endow the opposing local parties with collective identities and the opposing collectives with local or interpersonal sentiments.
Whereas Radly Balko says “If there’s a teachable moment to extract from Gates’ arrest, it’s that arrest powers should be limited to actual crimes.” And Tenured Radical says that what he learned living in an integrated neighborhood “is that white people put black people in danger every day.” Meanwhile, the police released a recording of the phone call to the police placed by the white neighbor.
I can’t say I really understand what is meant by “personal narrative” here, but wouldn’t it help to break the event up into its components? The officer was called out to the scene with a particular task. I understand Gates being angry, but the officer was simply doing his job. That might amount to systematic profiling, but if that is the case then the officer was the wrong target. Gates surely is smart enough to know there are ways to file complaints and that he is high profile enough to get a response to any he might file.
And if Gates had tried to pull it on Rorschach Rorschach would have dropped him down an elevator shaft.
I had a look at the _Times_ piece, which I think is helpful insomuch as it helps demonstrate what the Gates incident is not – a case of Driving While Black. What Blow experienced as an 18-year-old was a case of racial profiling by an individual officer acting on his own initiative. The officer who arrested Gates responded to a call. The two appear to me to be categorically different.
“if Gates had tried to pull it on Rorschach Rorschach would have dropped him down an elevator shaft.”
Indeed. But then it wouldn’t have much mattered how Gates responded, he would have ended up down an elevator shaft no matter what.
MTBradley, I cannot even imagine a situation in which an officer would arrest me for breaking into my house after I showed him my id with my address on it. I cannot read this story and think this officer was doing his job, because no officer would ever do his job that way with me.
I think there are distinct similarities between Blow’s story and Gates’. In each case, the officers responded to evidence of *lack* of threat with an escalation in aggressive/dominant behaviour. I think Blow’s point is excellent, in that it is not so much that cops do this because people are black, but that cops who do this know they can get away with doing it to black people more.
What I found interesting was the President’s response. Initially, he described the Cambridge police acting ‘stupidly’; Later, he retracted that word, shifting blame all round (even on himself). Was there a chance for engaging in the race debate here, and it was squandered? I do believe class is also an issue, from the police perspective (‘class’ is the subject few Americans can even identify; ‘class’ is invivisble, it’s merely recoded as ‘the American dream’). Whatever the issue, the opportunity for debate has been missed out on, the media will move to the next story, and the Gates affair will seem like a tempest in a tea pot. Has the Gates affair captured the psyche of the U.S.? Or merely the psyches of media analysts, reporters? I am thinking of nineteenth century France and the Dreyfus affair, which went to the heart of what it means to be a French citizen, and its exposing of antisemitism. Or even the French riots of a few years ago, reflecting xenophobia of immigrants. Has America become complacent with racism? Is what most Americans see as outrageous, not that a black man was arrested in his home; but that the police violated an unwritten code, that a man’s home is his castle? You know, gotta wait for those talk shows for insight on the matter.
bq. MTBradley, I cannot even imagine a situation in which an officer would arrest me for breaking into my house after I showed him my id with my address on it.
That’s not what Gates was arrested for.
bq. I think there are distinct similarities between Blow’s story and Gates’. In each case, the officers responded to evidence of lack of threat with an escalation in aggressive/dominant behaviour.
Whether they are bad seeds or not, making jokes to and yelling at cops are never, ever good ideas. Some cops are macho aggressive bigots – every cop is constantly attuned to possible danger. I do not say that by way of apology for anything that happened to Blow or Gates but I do feel that it needs to be said.
bq. Is what most Americans see as outrageous, not that a black man was arrested in his home; but that the police violated an unwritten code, that a man’s home is his castle?
I do think you are onto something there…
Intriguing, isn’t it, that everyone is omitting from the tale the nosey-parker neighbor who initiated the incident by calling the police and reporting suspicious black men attempting to enter the home next door.
…only now the 911 call shows that’s not what she said. How it went from “two guys” to “two black guys” will be the next question.
http://feeds.officer.com/officerrss/officer_down_news
Is there any way to get time stamps on original posts, comments, and addendums to original posts (not just in this thread but for the blog as a whole)? Clearly some of the “updates” to the original post in this thread are at least partly in response to some of the comments, but that is not at all obvious without some sort of chronological ordering.
And why did Adam Fish’s post disappear?
It is frightening how the severe left wing ignores the fact that
Gates was yelling, and chasing the police officer out the door, and that this was major egg on Obama’s face, because the officer was doing his job, and did not back down.
Gates and Obama lost out on this one, and America will be very suspicious next time the ‘Gang’ tries to play the race card.
Now the Gang is up to George Orwellian, gangster style bizzaro politics, and the left is surprisingly silent, for now.
Gates is apparently outraged to be a human being living in 21st century America. He needs to get over it. His children have.